Nonlinear narrative is a widely used storytelling device in various types of art and entertainment, including literature, film, and digital media, for example. Nonlinear narrative can make a story more engaging and memorable by conveying the story out of chronological order, so that relationships among events in the story may not follow the original causality pattern established by the story plot. Due to its wide use, a technique for analyzing nonlinear narratives could provide useful insights for authors, academics, and consumers of literature and entertainment content narrated non-linearly. In particular, analysis of the relationship between narrative time and story time may benefit authors by shedding light on various ways to arrange scenes out of chronological order in order to increase suspense or otherwise heighten audience engagement.
Although techniques for analyzing stories qualitatively, such as through close reading, and quantitatively, such as through distance reading, have been developed, relatively little analysis has been directed to the temporal order of events in narrative. One explanation for the scarcity of analytical techniques for investigating temporal ordering within storytelling, particularly in the computational domain, is that it typically requires human-level cognitive processing to reconstruct the temporal relationship between narrative order and storyline.